SILENT HINT: Townfail — or, The Omen: Resident Error
Sup, 4ch!
It’s ChetterChelvik here. Let me shut down any potentially inappropriate jokes right off the bat: that’s the alias of R. Daneel Olivaw, which he took in ‘Prelude to Foundation’, and I, in turn, borrowed from Nadezhda Sosnovskaya’s translation — because Olga Ponomaryova’s alternative made my Russian ears bleed with how damn unpleasant it sounded.
It is worth noting that Asimov thought like a Russian streetwise bro: somehow, in a book about psychohistory, he managed to write a genuinely ride-or-die male friendship between an alpha chad and his omega bro. The latter, of course, was Hari Seldon, who, in the glossy — and therefore, in my humble opinion, dogshit — Apple show, for some reason looked either like Trotsky or Colonel Sanders. Pure respect from the Russian bros — to Asimov, obviously, not to the Cupertino dudes!
And it is especially frustrating that in 1988 Liam Neeson starred in some piece of shit by Spock about some ‘the good mother’ (based on which, this summer, some Soviet-loving dude made a drugged-out RDR2-style game with Minecraft-tier graphics), instead of playing Demerzel/Hummin. Honestly, I have never come across a more fucking perfect counterpart to a protagonist in literature.
Just imagine it: Seldon and Olivaw (played by Liam Neeson!) tearing around the sectors of Trantor together while ‘Pleasure Castle …for Twinkle Park’ is blasting — and suddenly life just feels good again.
But anyway, today we are not actually talking about Asimov. We are talking about Belyaev. What does Belyaev have to do with any of this? — Tarkovsky might ask. And the answer is: everything, Andrei Arsenyevich, because his literary career was already approaching its end around the same time the ‘father of robotics’ was only beginning his ascent to the literary Olympus.
For example, Asimov’s cute (and, in a certain sense, downright kawaii) story ‘Robbie’ — which, IMHO, shameless Capcom blatantly jacked for their utterly pointless PRAGMATA this year and then mashed together with his own ‘The Gods Themselves’ — was begun in June 1939. Around that same time, the author of the legendary Amphibian Man published a much less famous work of his own: the science-fictional industrial novel ‘Under the Arctic Sky’.
It was this book that the game mentioned in the title of this article was based on. So yeah, let’s talk about it! Silent Hint: Townfail (or, as Russian distributors prefer to call it, Omen: Resident Error) is a veritable hymn to Soviet science, technology, and collective labor, wrapped by the boys from KOMONEY in the shell of a classic first-person shooter!
Back in the distant year of 1939, Alexander Romanovich could never have imagined that, almost a hundred years later, his hero Jim Jolly would become an action hero in the style of that very nuclear blonde guy in sunglasses, whose three-dimensional adventures on Ken Silverman’s engine turned the world of today’s oldfags upside down exactly thirty years ago!
“Though much I say you will not grasp today, do not be sad;
What you miss now, with time you will have.”
(Alexander Belyaev, Under the Arctic Sky, 1939)
It’s funny that the boom-bap playing in the game, with its distinctly jazzy ’90s flavor, was inspired by a motif from the undeservedly forgotten 1980s Soviet blockbuster ‘I Have the Honor’, starring Alexander Kahun — a man who could have wiped the floor with Schwarzenegger, who appeared alongside Kevin Peter Hall in what was then the ‘hot new thing.’
None of this should really come as a surprise, though, when you remember that the game itself was inspired by a remarkably obscure book by a now largely forgotten writer, published eighty-seven (sic!) years ago.
Far more interesting is this: given all the madness and chaos unfolding in the story, why didn’t KOMONEY add episodes featuring stealth at a railway station (including stealing a train), a cruise on a steamboat with Superman-style leaps straight from the deck onto a bridge, and even a terrorist operation to blow up a prisoner barge?
All this magnificence, filmed by Moldovan filmmakers during the years of perestroika and set to utterly drugged-out music by a composer from a little town near Oryol, would seem to fit perfectly into this game, which is trying to imitate Duke Nukem 3D and the first Heretic from 1994.
And remember the lines of Velimir Khlebnikov heard in that film:
“The slums and the forest were filled with a sound,
Groaning and ringing all over the ground.
So that, oh, so that — with a spear in his hand,
The hunter might finish the beast of the land!”
What more could one want as an extra spit in the face of the ‘Predator’ (which they originally wanted to call ‘Hunter’, no less)?
“Say, Pelkin, would you leave your North behind,
To seek the sunny Florida you’d find?”
“Of course not!”
“There you have it, friend:
True paradise begins where Earth’s cold poles extend!”
No, say what you will, frost is a wonderful thing. As Pushkin put it?..
“…mighty winter, fierce and bold,
Leads her armies, icy-cold.
Frost and snow in shaggy flight,
March against us day and night…”
Or, as Nekrasov has it:
“Frost the Voivode makes his rounds,
Where frozen silence shrouds the grounds.”
What can one say — a voivode. Not someone to fool around with. But if you know how to take hold of him, even he can be turned from a voivode into our humble servant. The same principle applies to stern samurai and their Scottish slaves: a couple of deft moves, and before they know it, their fearsome game has turned into a farce.
For what could be easier than taking their colorful (and slightly singed) comrade, handing him a Soviet shovel, and making him use this weapon of the proletariat to clear away the consequences of what the builders of communism have wrought beyond the Arctic Circle?
Yes, yes, our chocolate friend, now known as Jim Jolly (that is, ‘cheerful James,’ as opposed to the gloomy widower James Sutherland from Bloober’s Poland), by the will of fate finds himself in the Arctic. More precisely, not far from Cape Chelyuskin, where the so-called ‘Ice City’ was once being built with great enthusiasm. The enlightened minds of communism decided to turn the underground caves beneath the construction site into a genuine resort: they hung an artificial sun from the ceiling, planted all sorts of tropical vegetation, and released an entire menagerie down there.
However, the laws of the genre demand that such a scam should end up going completely to hell. And so their sun goes out, the plants wither, and the horses breathe… the foul breath of death! And our comrade Jim, slightly roasted by the artificial sun, is left to clean out these very Augean stables.
He will be assisted by an elven artifact — a crossbow, declared a weapon of heretics. After all, it does not fire ordinary arrows, but magical projectiles — three at a time, just like in that famous tale from ‘Raven Software’ (or was it ‘Falco’ after all?).
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Along the way, our chocolate friend will encounter maddened chickens (because socialism needs eggs!), genetically modified pumpkins (remember: there is no Halloween in the USSR!), walking dea… er, I mean, corn cobs (Khrushchev is turning over in his grave as we speak), and animated garden scarecrows — stern in the Soviet manner, rather than glamorous like the ones those Chinese showed us in the story of the anime fox-girl Hinako.
“Chief, I think you should study the Guardian Birds more closely.”
(Robert Sheckley, The Guardian Bird, 1953)
And don’t forget the vehicles that have risen up against their masters — the very ones made for manure and mud, not for transporting millionaire asses — as well as the great and terrible Guardian Birds, spawned from the imagination of Robert Sheckley, a brilliant science-fiction writer whose work the capitalist world has unjustly left in the shadows.
True, here they have grown feathers, and after being hit by the elven crossbow they amusingly hang suspended right there in mid-air, but they still glare maliciously at Jim, as if reminding him: “Metal and electrons reason logically, but not as people do.”
But the main hit of the season, without a doubt, was the Kolobok — the very same one who, according to an old joke, hanged himself. No one, however, expected that afterward he would also turn into a zombie (or, after the ascension of Eve Lyne to the throne of the gods, would it be more politically correct to call him a ‘molded’?).
From the bites of this infection-ridden, hug-obsessed companion, our unjolly Jim will have to restore his health with red apples that grow straight out of the ground like roses. And no, of course, these are definitely not the exact same fruits that the aforementioned fifty-three-inch goddess wore in her hair like trendy accessories.
“Once upon a time, by Granny’s side,
A little gray goat lived and hopped with pride,
Oh, little gray goat, so small and sweet,
Oh, little gray goat with nimble feet!”
(Sergey Snegov, Humans as Gods, Part Two: Invasion into Perseus, 1968)
And of course, how could we do without the little gray goats wandering here and there — the absolute favorites of André Scherstyuk? Some particularly impressionable individuals consider these adorable beasts to be almost the embodiment of Satan in general and the Antichrist in particular. There may be some truth to that — at least if we consider that these horned comrades intend to impale our cheerful Jim on their horns. And they’re not the only ones: the rest of the evil residents of this amazing ‘resistive evocation’ intend to do exactly the same.
In short, as you have probably realized by now, nobody is going to give Jim any breaks — for the original program of this amazing menagerie, together with its plants, gardening implements, and assorted household equipment, contained one simple rule: if all other means of fighting for the bright future should fail, the capitalist world is to be simply destroyed — starting, naturally, with something small: our Jim Jolly.
So all that remains for our ebony protagonist is to put his faith in the spirits of Corvus and Duke Nukem and carry out a total cleansing of all this Soviet filth. And accompanying this noble cause in the name of capitalism will be a well-worn record of New York hip-hop, in which, however, one can distinctly hear the unmistakable flavor of Oryol Oblast — or, more precisely, the glorious city of Bolkhov.
IMPORTANT!
This is a non-commercial fan-made work inspired by SILENT HILL: Townfall.
All rights to the original world, characters, and brand belong to Konami. This project was created by fans, is not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders, and does not claim ownership of any of their intellectual property.
In short: this is unofficial fan work, not an official Konami release.
POSTSCRIPT
And finally, a little something about Robert Sheckley. More specifically, a funny little coincidence that, as a fan of his, I absolutely couldn’t ignore.
Sixty-nine years ago, in 1957, he wrote a short story called ‘Country Caper’, and, man, you really can’t read it today without noticing how weirdly close its setup is to Resident Evil 7. At first glance, the two don’t seem to have that much in common. But let’s back up for a second.
An overconfident young guy named Madden walks into a roadside diner, where the friendly owner tells him about a supposedly helpless old man named Blandford, his fortune, and the safe hidden in his attic.
Madden, being exactly the kind of guy who hears ‘there’s a fortune in that house’ and immediately thinks the universe has personally handed him free money, breaks in that same night. He gets to the safe, hears the voice of the ‘sick old man,’ and follows the advice of his new best friend: scare Blandford with a good, loud shout and let the old guy’s weak heart do the rest.
“It’s me!” Madden shouted at the top of his lungs, switching on his flashlight and pointing it toward the other half of the room. “Here I am… here, here, HERE!”
And that is where our guy learns a tiny little detail that is, unfortunately, extremely important: he isn’t the victim. He’s the target.
By announcing himself like that, Madden basically walks into the perfect firing position and hands the ‘invalid’ a completely clean shot.
Sound familiar? Jack Baker, anyone?
“Welcome to the family, son!”
Except Sheckley’s version of the family welcome is a lot more low-key: one bullet from a suppressed revolver, followed by Blandford casually calling that same bartender — “Your cut, as usual, Scotty” — and calmly going through the dead man’s pockets.
And honestly, that’s the part that gets me. Long before Capcom showed up with its moldy Louisiana murder family, Sheckley had already assembled almost the exact same ingredients: a lonely house, rumors that mean something completely different once you know the truth, an overconfident idiot walking straight into a trap, and a homeowner who has absolutely zero interest in playing the helpless victim.
The difference is that Sheckley, being the sci-fi pro he was, actually knew when to stop.
He takes this neat little crime setup, lands the joke, and gets out.
Capcom, meanwhile, looked at roughly the same premise and went, okay, but what if we turned the whole thing into a fever dream?
So instead of one elegant little con, we get a deranged family mansion, a literal stapler standing in for surgery, an old-woman/little-girl nightmare combo doing its deeply cursed little Lolita routine around the protagonist, and enough misery to qualify as a whole perestroika-era movie by itself — all wrapped in that bizarre RE7 tone where the game keeps swinging so hard between grotesque, campy, ridiculous, and genuinely bleak that eventually you’re not even laughing anymore.
You’re just sitting there thinking: “Bro, what are we even doing here.”
